Outside the box
It's been a while...
Solo Crowdfund Early Access
A lot of you have been asking why you haven’t heard from us recently. Sorry about that, we’ve been hibernating. Like many start ups, we decided to make it our aim to become profitable at the end of last year. That meant that we cut costs at all costs, and we’re out of the other side as a much stronger business. We might have been quiet, but we’ve extremely busy. Here’s a little recap of what we’ve been up to.
Growing on-trade. As you all probably know, lots of bars use our Coffee Concentrate for espresso martinis. Around 2000 now! Which back-of-the-napkin calculations suggests we are the coffee base in roughly 1 in 30 espresso martinis in the UK. Last year we landed in Mitchell's and Butler’s, the group that owns All Bar One, O’Neills, Miller and Carter, Browns, Vintage Inns and many more. This year we started supplying Stonegate, owners of Slug and Lettuce, Be At One and many more. We’re also happy to see our product in The Ivy, Tokyo Industries and lots of lovely indie bars across the country, including some of the top 50 bars in the UK.
Millie Bobby Brown. In a very strange twist of fate, and gruelling work from Chris (Head of Marketing) we started supplying Millie Bobby Brown with our coffee concentrate for her new brand Florence By Mills Coffee. This product will be sold online internationally. Her team recognised the coffee concentrate’s potential as an at-home coffee solution and have done a brilliant job of marketing it. Stranger things have happened, but we’re excited to see where this goes.
US. As we hinted at last year, the US is crying out for our product. The cold brew market is much more established there and as a result, it’s much easier for them to see the benefit in using our product as a base for iced coffees, hot coffees and cold brews. Hopefully we can also teach them a bit about espresso martinis. We’ve started production out there and will have some big updates on that soon.
General growth. We achieved £1.17m in revenue last financial year which is over 160% year-on-year growth. In February, we hit break even and are aiming to be profitable this year. We are looking at increasing our on-trade, launching in new markets, and expanding in new channels (foodservice, retail, and improve DTC offering).
Fundraising. In order to keep up with this crazy growth, we’ve been speaking to investors about a fundraise. At this point, we want angel investors that really believe in our brand, product and vision and can see the potential in us. We have a nice group of people that we’ve decided to work with but thought it would be amazing to offer a slice of the pie to all of you lovely people. As such, we’ll be doing a crowdfund! And who better to get involved than the people who already use our product and have supported us in getting to this place.
If you would like to hear more, please register your interest here. There’s no minimum amount you can invest and we’d really like to have as many people as possible involved. If you have any questions, please email theo@solocoffee.co.uk
- Click the link below and register your interest in investing (you don’t need to invest anything now, this is just to give us an idea how many people are interested).
- We’ll let you know when our early access opens.
- Invest and become a part of our journey in redefining the world’s perception of coffee and energising a generation.
Solo Crowdfund Early Access
Disclaimer: please note investing is risky, be it crowdfunding or any other form of investment. We encourage you to carry out your own research and weigh the advantages and disadvantages of an investment.
